Justly celebrated as one of the most famous masterpieces of Northern Renaissance art, this work shows a goldsmith in a tiny shop outfitted with the finely wrought civic, secular, and ecclesiastic wares of his trade, displayed on the shelves at the right. The painting is a virtual advertisement for the goldsmith's guild of Bruges in whose guildhall the painting may have hung. The main figure may be Eligius, patron saint of goldsmiths, as traditionally believed, or perhaps more likely a portrait of an actual goldsmith in fifteenth-century Bruges.